In the Company of the Courtesan

by Sarah Dunant

  Whatever the reasons, my loins have grown cold on me. Instead I have lavished my attention on my abacus beads and the richness of Mauro’s sauces and have chosen not to think about the warmth of a woman’s body. Until, that is, I feel my mother’s arms around me again, and find myself crying as much at the comfort as at the pain.

  My God, to be beholden to a sightless cripple. Did I come this far for that?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  As I make my way across town, I consider what I know of her, this woman who has been in my life for almost a decade yet whom I have chosen to ignore. I know that she came to Venice first as a child, and that her parents died when she was still young. My lady told me once that she had been married, but her husband died early, and since then she has lived alone, which in itself is a thing of some wonder in Venice, for single women of her age are fodder for convents or the casual violence of men. In this her deformity might well have been her aid; that, along with her reputation as a witch, would have most men holding on to their balls rather than flaunting them. There is no doubt she runs a healthy enough business now. I know that ours is not the only casa she visits (a few years ago she disappeared for months on end, returning as quietly as she had gone, with no explanation), but whoever else she tends, like a priest, she keeps other people’s confessions to herself. Of course, what she cannot see she cannot tell. Though I have underestimated her talents to my cost in the past. Most recently, it has to be said, to my own shame. I will not do so again.

  The place where she lives is to the northeast of the city, between the Rio di Santa Giustina and the convent of La Celestia, an area I know hardly at all. I orient myself by the convent’s bell tower, which rises from the rooftops and looks out over the sea (my God, how cold and damp their cells must be in winter). I cross a canal toward it and move into a mass of alleys and huddled houses. Somewhere in here, there will be a campo with a baker’s oven and a church and a stone well, an ancient small island joined to all the others, like the one where we first lived and where the old man kept vigil over the water level so long ago.

  In the end it is my nose that takes me there, for the smell of roasting pig is always a good compass. The spit is in the middle of the square, the carcass skewered and stuffed, its juices spitting fireworks into the fire beneath. Nearby three men are setting up two barrels of teriaca. Like everyone else, they are celebrating, and if I want to find La Draga, I should do so before they start drinking. There are maybe two dozen men and women and a handful of children already gathered, and I am enough of a freak visitor to become instant entertainment, for even a city like Venice has backwaters. I brave a few quips about the roasting of the well-dressed duck that just waddled in and how the perfumes of its beard will do instead of spices before finding myself the most presentable young woman available and bowing low to her in a way that can be seen as cute if I get the flourish right.

  The laughter around me is so raucous that I know it has worked, and I have a free bowl of gut rot in my hand before I have time to introduce myself. Why not? We are all guests at the wedding feast of our state, and it is incumbent on us to enjoy ourselves liberally. I gulp it down, and my coughing fit causes another explosion of mirth, so that the girl I have picked has to thump me on the back, egged on by the rest of them. When I come up for air, I note that she is still young enough to be a little shy, and that her lips are reddish and full like the inside flesh of a ripe pomegranate. I smile at her (more beguiling than my weapon grin) and join in with their mockery, taking another, smaller swig and making theater out of the thick burn that it carves down the back of my throat. The girl is staring, wide-eyed, and the woman behind her shoves her sharply in my direction so that she half trips onto me and I have to use all my strength to stop her from falling. As she straightens up, laughing indignantly, I get a glimpse into her mouth and see a run of half-rotted teeth and catch a whiff of decay. And to my shame, my growing excitement drains away.

  Maybe Aretino is right and I am more woman than man now, God help me.

  The campo is filling up fast, and I use the liquor’s tongue-loosening capacities to talk to a few others and ask the whereabouts of the healer called La Draga. Everyone knows her, it seems, though there is some disagreement over exactly which house is hers. A woman with a fat scar on her face spits over my shoes at the sound of her name, calling her a whore who heals the rich but lets the poor die. A younger woman disagrees; then a man wades in, and within seconds people are shoving at one another. If I were a general, I’d breakfast my army on teriaca before any battle. Just so long as they didn’t turn on one another before they reached the enemy. As I make my way out of the square in the direction of her street, I notice that the girl is watching me from the edge of the crowd, though as soon as I catch her eye, she looks hastily away. I move over to her and bow again, and this time I ask her directly for her hand. She is unsure now, like a young colt presented with its first bridle, but in the end she offers it. I turn it over, kiss the palm, and then press a silver ducat into it before folding her fingers back over it gently. I blow her a kiss as I leave, and as I go I see her unfurling her fingers, a look of wonder on her face, and then she smiles and waves to me, and for some reason the sight of her joy makes me want to cry.

  La Draga’s street is off the campo on the edge of a small canal. I approach it from the land. The houses are cramped and half bent over the cobbles, their stonework broken and peeling. In summer you would be able to smell your neighbors’ farts, assuming the other rot hadn’t stripped your nostrils first. The smell is bad enough as it is.

  Her house, it is generally agreed, is next to the last before the corner. I have lived in places like this, when I first arrived in Rome. I know the gloom that I will find inside. And possibly the squalor. If she is lucky, she will have a room to herself. If she is successful—and I cannot see how she would not be—she may have two. Unless, of course, there is a husband. My God. I have never given it a thought, that she might have married again. She has always been alone in my mind, a woman living off her wits. As I do too.

  I knock. And get no answer. Then again, louder. I try the door, but it is locked.

  A few seconds later, I hear someone moving behind it.

  “Who is it?” Her voice, but rough, suspicious.

  “It is Bucino.” I pause. “Bucino Teodoldi.”

  “Bucino?” I hear her surprise. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Yes. But…I…I need to speak with you.”

  “Er…I can’t see you now.”

  But I have decided. This is the purpose of my day. “It is important,” I hear myself say. “I can wait or come back later.”

  “Er…no…no. I—I can come in a little while. Do you know the campo nearby?”

  “Yes. But it is mad with people.”

  “Go to the steps by the door of the church. I will meet you there.”

  I move back to the square. It is fuller already, and the girl has disappeared. I climb the few steps to the wooden door of the church and wait. What is she doing now? Was there someone in there with her? A client perhaps? She must keep all her medicaments somewhere. I imagine a chest full of jars and potions, pestles and mortars for crushing, scales for weighing. It makes me think of that little back room where my solemn Jew measured and bought people’s wealth. Or my office full of ledgers and beads. For we are working men and women, all of us: despite the burdens of our race or our deformities, we have found ways to be in the world, dependent on no one, earning our living with a kind of pride. For even I have to admit that there is much skill in her healing, and even in her witchcraft.

  I am high enough to spot her as soon as she turns the corner into the campo. She is dressed for the festival, a pale blue gown that I think is new—or maybe I have never noticed it before—its skirt full, with lace fringing, and a shawl of the same color over her head. She is carrying a stick, which I have seen her do at other times, and which makes her progress easier, for she can use it to sweep the ground in front of he
r and assess obstacles faster. People know her enough to move out of her way here anyway, though halfway across a woman comes up to her, and while I cannot hear what is said, it feels from her square stance and the way she blocks the way that it is not a comfortable encounter. I get to my feet in case La Draga needs help (what help could I give?), but it is over almost as soon as it has begun, and soon she is at the steps, her stick sweeping its way upward.

  “I am here,” I say, and she turns to me with that strange little smile of hers, the smile that she has never seen for herself but that seems to say she knew where I was all along and was simply checking. Her eyes are closed, which she also does sometimes. I think it might be painful for her to keep them open, for I have noticed that when she does she seems never to blink, which is one of the reasons why that dense milk stare is so upsetting when you first see it. I have not given much thought to her welfare before, but then I have a recent experience of suffering against which to match that of others.

  The tip of the stick locates my foot, and she lowers herself to the step, next to me. We have never met like this, outside the house. Around us the city is celebrating, meeting, greeting, carousing; it is a day that will have all kinds of consequences.

  “How did you find me?” Her voice is soft again now, as I remember it.

  “Oh, you are famous around here.”

  “You are better, yes? To have walked so far.”

  “Better, yes.”

  “Though weak still, I think.”

  “Well…Mauro is feeding me well.”

  She nods. I watch her fingers playing with the top of the stick, and it strikes me that she is as nervous as I am, sitting out here alone with me. How many years have we known each other now? Yet how little do we know.

  “I…I have come…I have come to thank you.”

  She crooks her head, and the smile becomes puzzled. “I did not do so much. The infection took its course. I only helped hold down the fever.”

  “No,” I say. “I think you did much more than that.” I pause

  “I…I would have gone mad with it. The pain.”

  She nods. “Yes. When it comes inside the head, it is very bad.”

  Again I think about her eyes. “You said that once before to me. You know about such things?”

  “I—I have felt it in other people.”

  “I used to get pain like that when I was a child.”

  “It is from the shape of your ear.”

  “Yes, you told me that too. You have studied such things?”

  “A little.”

  I am staring at her as she talks. Her skin is so pale and smooth, her eyelashes resting like half-moon fringes on her cheeks. My lady tells me that when Tiziano saw her once at our house, he wanted to paint her, for he thinks she has something of the mystic about her. One can see why. The years have hardly aged her at all, and there is a strange light to her face, the way her thoughts and feelings seem to move across it like constantly changing weather. He is right: she would make a fine addition to one of his religious works, and he of all people might be able to capture that inner light, for he seems to see the spirit of a person as clearly as he sees the body. But she is not interested in immortality, or not the kind that he can offer, and when he asked, she would have none of him. I like that about her, though I have not realized it until now.

  “How is Fiammetta?” she says after a while.

  “She is…I don’t know what words to use…quiet, resigned. You know the pup is leaving? She told you that?”

  “Yes. The news of it came when I was there.”

  “She is sad,” I say. “But she will recover?” And while I mean to say it firmly, it comes out as a question.

  “If a wound is clean, it matters less if it is deep,” she says. “It’s when the passion is not shared that gangrene eats its way in.”

  “Yes.” I pause.

  Come now, Bucino. If you can survive agony, you can do this.

  “I—I am sorry…about that day, when I found out about him. I was as much angry with myself as I was with you.”

  She gives a little shrug, as if she knew that all along and was just waiting for me to realize it too. Only now that I have started, I have to go on.

  “You did not need to be so kind to me, you know…I mean afterward. God knows, I have not always been kind to you.”

  “I…” And to my surprise she falters a little too now. “It was nothing. You were…I mean, the remedies worked for you.”

  Only now the air suddenly feels strange between us. As if neither of us knows where to step next.

  “Your care of me took up a lot of your time,” I say, to stem the disquiet I feel. “Yet you did not leave a bill.”

  “No…er…I was busy with other things.”

  “I thought you would come back.”

  “No. I…The city is crowded now. I cannot move around so easily.”

  “No, no, of course not.” Her restlessness is growing, and I am afraid that she is going to leave.

  “Well, thank God for you,” I say quickly. “For without you I would be dead now.”

  She frowns. “You must not say that. I did not save your life, only brought down the fever.” She repeats quietly, “You should be careful, though; water is not good for you.” She starts to stand. “I—I have to go now.”

  I stand up too, and before I have thought about it, I put out a hand—to help her up, to say good-bye, to get her to stay, for I still have things to say: to apologize for my rudeness, my misjudgments. But she pulls away from the touch almost as I reach her, though more gently than she might have done before, as if she is as unsure of me now as I am of her. I can feel it in the way she moves, in the little laugh she gives, the tilt of her head. What is she thinking now? Surely I cannot be the only one who remembers the way she held me and the soft river of words?

  “Well, good-bye then, Bucino,” she says, face bright, lips slightly parted on the smile. “Stay well.”

  “I will. Good-bye.”

  I watch her move down the steps and make her way back carefully across the side of the square and into her street. I sit for a while staring into the madness of the crowd. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes pass, and then a man sees me and raises his arm and starts to make his way over. But I am not interested in new friends, especially ones made sociable on teriaca. I am into the melee before he can reach me. I take the same corner that she did. And the next. I am going to her house again. Will I stand in front of the door and knock once more? I have no idea. I am too busy walking.

  But it doesn’t happen like that. Because as I turn in to her street, I spot a figure from the back at the end of it. It is she. Same dress, same shawl, though now she has a bag over one shoulder. I watch the sweep and tap of her stick as it moves efficiently in front of her. She gets to the corner and turns. I move after her. When I reach the same place, she is crossing a bridge to the left, and I stop because we are the only ones on the street now and I know how well she sees through her ears. I note where she turns, and when she is gone from view, I follow. Why? Because…because today is a holiday and I can do what I wish with my time. Because she saved my life. Because I have never been down these streets before. Because I am curious to know where she is going. Because…I follow her because…

  After a few blocks the air begins to shift around us, and a mist starts to move in, gruel-thin but persistent, pulled off the sea. She, of course, will be unaware of its impact, though I daresay she is acute enough to note the new edge of moisture in the air. I try to imagine what it must be like to be inside her head, to move through continual darkness with only the echoes from walls, stone, and water to delineate her path. She has such confidence. But then these are her local streets, and a city always holds less terror for its natives. I once asked my old man at the well how he had first learned his way around such a mad place. He told me he couldn’t remember, for it happened when he was still a child. I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its un
dercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all. Perhaps it was the same for her. Just as I negotiate a tall world being small, she learned to navigate a sighted world through other senses, “seeing” through hearing or smell or touch. I think of my temporary deafness. What a bizarre couple we would have made then: my eyes and her ears. My waddle, her limp. If we had the time and inclination, we might find our worlds hold many things in common. But for all this time I have been too harsh and proud even to bother.

  She is heading north, with the Rio di Santa Giustina somewhere to our left. The closer we get to the shoreline, the heavier the mist. Venice is a capricious mistress when it comes to weather, and I wonder about the fleet now halfway out into the lagoon. Ahead, the dark wall of houses breaks open to expose the thick, gray expanse of the sea. Now, at last, she stops. And turns, one way, then back. On instinct I pull myself into a doorway as if she had eyes—stupid. But it is not me she is hearing, rather the change of sounds that comes with the open water and the absence of buildings. There are voices approaching through the mist, and she moves off, presumably toward them, for her ear is sharper than mine. I quicken my pace to follow. The shoreline is long, the seawall low, and the cobbles are wet, as if a recent tide has flooded them. The mist is at its most dense on the water. Usually from the shore you can see the islands of San Michele and Murano, but there is only gray now.

  Ahead is a group of figures: children, people with babies and packages, waiting, as if for a boat. Of course. On this of all days, there will be people moving to and from the islands. Sure enough, there comes the slap of oars, and almost at the same moment a sturdy barge half full, with room for maybe another ten or fifteen people, breaks into view on the near horizon. On land, the group picks up their parcels and children and move closer to the little wooden dock as the boat pulls itself in, tossing its great ropes around the thick wooden piles. La Draga is with them now. God help me. Of course. She too must be going home. What was it the old man said about her once? That she was born on one of the islands but came to the city as a child. No doubt she has family to visit. I stand frozen by the shore.